Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy

by Stephen G. Salkever

Overview

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691604985
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy , #221
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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Finding the Mean

Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy

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By Stephen G. Salkever

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07803-8

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CHAPTER 1

ARISTOTLE'S TELEOLOGY AND THE TRADITION OF EVALUATIVE EXPLANATION

The theoretical basis of Aristotelian practical philosophy is a particular understanding of the human good, a particular kind of teleology. In compact form, this understanding goes as follows: practical philosophy takes its bearings from a concept of the human good, but a very precise conception of the human good makes practical philosophy unnecessary. The Aristotelian notion of the human good, which I will try to present and defend in this and the following chapter, thus must meet two challenges. The first is the relativist or reductionist claim that there is no such thing as a human good apart from the goods or desires of particular individuals or cultures. The second is equally though less obviously anti-Aristotelian: the claim that there is indeed a human good, and that this good is clearly and precisely intelligible to those who know how to see it. For us, the Aristotelian "human good" is especially difficult to understand, since the debate about teleology in our time seems to be entirely a matter of choosing between the adherents of these two anti-Aristotelian positions, the defenders of scientific reduction and those supporting some form of prophecy, whether religious or political. The Aristotelian position is all the more obscure today because it is covered over not by dull hegemony but by a sharp controversy. In order to arrive at the Aristotelian notion of the human good, then, and to see how it might be useful to entertain it, we must consider some of the ways in which contemporary theoretical discourse quite unintentionally makes Aristotle's teleology so difficult to understand.

One of these categorical concealments is the distinction between political philosophy and empirical political science, a separation that by now has the status of a traditional institution within the academic discipline of political science. From one perspective this separation is not only commonplace but perfectly reasonable: it simply reflects a sensible division of labor within the field, since it is surely impossible for one person to become sufficiently expert both in the interpretation of those texts and problems which compose the subject matter of political philosophy and in those techniques and sets of data which define the field of empirical political studies. And yet this distinction has other, less desirable consequences and implications than the institutionalization of mutual tolerance, and perhaps even respect, between two groups of scholars approaching similar problems from different points of view. The separation between political philosophy and political science, or between normative and empirical political theory, carries with it or implies a number of important assertions about the character of things known and the way they are knowable.

Chief among these is the distinction between facts and values or goods, and the claim that facts are known empirically, while values are either not objectively knowable or knowable in some a priori way. Such commitments, all the more powerful for being deeply embedded in a reasonable and historically sanctioned division of labor, have the effect of unobtrusively shaping political discourse, although they may themselves appear highly implausible when subjected to direct scrutiny. I have in mind primarily the way in which the distinction between political philosophy and political science (as well as the more general distinction between moral philosophy or ethics and social science) works to separate the processes of evaluation and explanation, of critique and understanding, against the intentions of many within the discipline to practice a political science that is both evaluative and explanatory.

My goal in this chapter is to propose an explanation of how this separation arose and why it is so tenacious, and to suggest the conditions under which it might be overcome. The project is Aristotelian in several ways: it sets out to defend Aristotle's political science as a plausible and attractive explanatory (and evaluative) approach, and it tries to do so while retaining what is valuable in the present-day separation of political philosophy and political science. The second part of the project is Aristotelian in the sense that it aims at preserving the phenomena (in the sense of the endoxa, or reputable opinions)1 of our contemporary distinction while reinterpreting it in such a way as to avoid what seem to be its unfortunate consequences.

The Tradition of Evaluative Explanation

Long before the origin of the modern distinction, political philosophy and science took shape as a particular tradition of discourse in Greece. Even before Plato, the outlines of this tradition are visible in the aphoristic thrusts of Heraclitus. The hallmark of this enterprise is the attempt to theorize, to articulate a perspective that is both more universal and more objective than those that are otherwise available. These claims to universalization and to the overcoming of subjectivity are combined in this Heraclitean injunction: "Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one" (DK 50). The theoretical logos aims at disclosing the structure that informs all the phenomena of our ordinary experience (DK 1), and doing so in a way that will be compelling quite independently of the personal identity of the philosopher. The entity which grounds Heraclitus' logos (and into which it vanishes) is the permanent kosmos, which is said to be prior to both divinity and humanity: "The kosmos is the same for all things, was made by no one among the gods or human beings, but always was and is and will be" (DK 30). This perspective is humanly important (or good) because it makes true speech and action possible, by giving us the power to grasp things according to their natures: "Sophrosune is the greatest virtue and wisdom: acting and speaking truly, perceiving things according to their nature (kata phusin)" (DK 32).

The natural order is hard to see, both because it loves to hide (DK 123) and because it has the character of a harmony or ordering of things (DK 54), rather than a simple substance. It is also obscure because of the powerful human tendency to subjectivity: "Although the logos is common, the many (hoi polloi) live as if their wisdom were private" (DK 23). Philosophy is undertaken as a corrective to the human tendency to think and act against our great need for theorizing, a destructive tendency reinforced by the words of both the poets and the people organized as a political unit, the demos (DK 104). Heraclitus' attitude toward the polis is ambivalent, however: while the order established by the city does obscure and compete with the natural order, the polis nevertheless reflects nature even as it distorts it, "for all human nomoi are nourished by the divine one" (DK 114). Our interest in a simulacrum of theoretical rationality is thus the foundation of our interest in the political life, and is the basis for the claim that "it is necessary for the demos to fight for the nomos as for the city wall" (DK 44). Just as Heraclitus attempts to establish a perspective that reveals the uses as well as the abuses of political order, so does his theorizing in general aim at establishing a perspective on the basis of which the ordinary world of phenomena can be understood, rather than at providing an alternative dwelling place. This is nicely illustrated by the story Aristotle tells of Heraclitus' response to some strangers who hesitated to enter his house when they found the great man warming himself by the kitchen fire: "Come in, don't be afraid; for there are gods in here too" (Parts of Animals 645a20–21). The theoretical enterprise is thus at its inception both evaluative and explanatory: it begins with the sense that there is a human need for a universal perspective on the basis of which the local and particular things take on a new and better meaning, a meaning not supplied by the traditional accounts of the gods, by the poets, or by the city and its laws. This enterprise, whether we call it scientific or philosophic, is inseparable from the perception of a human interest in rationality as a way of life.

Plato is sharply critical of several aspects of Heraclitean science, particularly the assertion of universal flux (DK 12, 91) and the claim that all things can be explained by reference to a fiery first cause (DK 30). But in spite of this criticism, it is clear that he is extending and elaborating the central features of the Heraclitean project: the theoretical aim of universalization for the sake of explaining particular things; the demand for objectivity, for listening to the logos rather than to particular persons or traditions; and the thought that scientific inquiry is inseparable from our interest in living well. This last thought involves the assertion that living according to nature, or the forms, or whatever name we give to the universal perspective theory discloses, is more desirable than a life which takes its bearings from the goods embedded in the practices of the various human cultures or cities. Being and value, explanation and evaluation, are intimately related here, but in a particular way: the forms or nature do not create or announce rules of conduct, as a god, a prophet, or a legislator might; instead they provide a perspective or center from which we can make choices among conflicting goods. Platonic and Heraclitean science are thus both teleological, in the sense that they explain the phenomena in such a way as to make a certain disposition and orientation toward those phenomena inescapable for anyone who accepts the explanation. This happens because the explanations take the form of insights into the ordering of the elements that constitute our particular world, as in the Heraclitean claim that the hidden harmony is prior to the visible elements, and the Platonic assertion of the priority of forms or natures to visible things.

Plato and Heraclitus are thus in agreement concerning the two key points which, according to Leo Strauss, define the origins of philosophic discourse in Greece: the discovery of nature as a principle of organization, and the opposition of that principle to traditional or political authority. But in bringing philosophy down from the heavens and into the political controversies of human life, Socrates and Plato make two key revisions in the Heraclitean understanding, one thematic and one stylistic. The first is the extensive development of a language for understanding human activity, for treating humanity as a whole. The only way to give an adequate answer to the question of what justice is, the Republic (352d2–6) tells us, is by recasting the question of the definition of justice into a question about the best human life; this in turn can be answered only by opening the question of the nature of the human soul (435c4–d8), which turns out to involve not the discovery of some occult entity but the discovery of the proper ordering of the various desires that animate human activity (580d3–e5). What Plato does is to establish a theoretical perspective that will allow us to make the choices that are forced on us by the multiple and conflicting character of human needs and wants. Toward the end of Book 1 of the Republic (352d8–353ell), Socrates gives a compact version of an approach to this question that is later elaborated by Aristotle: the way to determine whether a proposed virtue or way of life is truly desirable is to ask whether that life corresponds to the function or work (ergon) that defines human beings as a specific class, different from, say, horses and knives. Part of this inquiry turns out to require an understanding of the way in which human life is related to the rest of the universe; but while an inquiry into the good as such is necessary to complete an understanding of the human good (or the appropriate human ordering of wants and needs), it cannot make the understanding of the human soul otiose. At any rate, the good as presented in Republic 6 (505a2–509bl0) cannot be described with sufficient precision to serve as such a norm, since it can be referred to only through an image, and even then is said to be "beyond being" rather than one of the knowable beings.

The other important difference between Plato and Heraclitus is the relative lack of any prophetic or revolutionary tone in the dialogues. Socrates' irony and playfulness, his unwillingness to say all that he knows, and his insistence on saying different things to different people consistently defeat the expectation that theorizing should result in a set of general rules or customs of the same order of determinateness and precision as those of the city. For whatever reason—perhaps because no particular human being can act in a perfectly human way at all times—nothing can be done as it is said, and moderation and tact are the virtues controlling the philosopher's speech. Explanation and evaluation are linked within the account of the human soul, within the theory of the appropriate organization of human needs and wants, but this theorizing is not a substitute for particular choices; rather, it is a preparation for making them.

Aristotle's criticism of Platonic science is in many respects similar to the Platonic critique of Anaxagoras. His contention is that the notion of universal and separate forms or ideas cannot serve as an explanation for the existence of particulars; Plato's "participation" metaphor is insufficient as a causal account (Metaphysics Eta, 1045b7–9). Leaving aside Plato's experiments with forms and taking up instead his suggestions about natures, Aristotle says that while there are no universals which exist separately from individual instances (Metaphysics Zeta, 1040b26–27), every natural thing can be understood in terms of the potentiality (dunamis) and function or actuality (energeia) which define it. More will be said below about Aristotle's use of "potentiality" and "actuality" as the basic terms of causal explanation, but we may note here that with these terms Aristotle attempts to develop an approach to the study of living things that is both explanatory and evaluative. In doing so, he makes claims about the specific character of human needs and capacities which are more explicit and detailed than anything found in Plato. The content of Aristotle's psychology, his substantive account of the human good, is complex and will form the theme of Chapter 2, but a rough summary would note his view that human beings are unique among living things in being threatened with the danger of an episodic or disorganized life, and that our greatest need (though generally not, as a matter of fact, our strongest desire) is to actualize our capacity for living according to some reasonable plan, the details of which will vary widely, just as our capacities and situations vary.

The form (eidos) or end (telos) or actuality (energeia) of a thing is the primary means of explaining what each natural thing is (Physics 2, 193b6–18), and this explanation is at the same time evaluative or critical, since in giving an account of any given human being or human culture we must characterize its goals or practices in terms of and relative to the goals that define human being as a certain kind of entity. The Politics, Ethics, and Rhetoric are filled with explanations/ evaluations of this kind; in all of them, human nature understood as a hierarchy of ends serves as the perspective from which to judge the extent to which various characteristic ways of life and cultural institutions are just or right (dikaios) by nature. Human nature provides a ground for judgments that are at once causal and evaluative, even though what is just or right by nature does not—for Aristotle any more than for Plato—take the form of universal laws, but varies, within limits, from place to place and person to person.

The claims made by the original understanding of political philosophy or science, if my account of it is correct, may well appear surprisingly modest. The central activity of this science is that of giving a causal account of particular things; such causal explanation is taken to mean placing a particular individual or practice relative to the universal which defines it as human or mammalian or whatever. In Aristotelian terms, this is known as functional explanation, or explanation by final causes. We constantly give explanations of this kind in ordinary speech. When we say that a legal system is repressive, or an employer is negligent in providing for the safety of workers, or a person suffers from amnesia, we are placing that institution or person relative to our understanding of the problems and possibilities of human beings in particular circumstances. Such explanations are implicitly evaluative: they express judgments about whether a thing is being done as well as it could be done, not only relative to our private tastes or the norms of our culture, but relative to a definitive species-specific context. These explanations all presuppose claims about invisible matters of fact (fair laws, conscientious employers, mentally healthy human beings), and these are subject to criticism on the grounds of possible mistakes about either the individual or the universal. Teleological explanations do indeed depend upon certain assumptions about the world that cannot be proven and that are always contestable; but these assumptions are not shocking or contrary to the way in which we all encounter the world, without science, through language: they amount only to the premise that our world happens to be the sort of place in which events are not loose and disconnected but occur in the context of wholes of the sort we call kinds or species and Aristotle calls natures (Physics 2, 193a1–4). While this priority of wholes to individual events cannot be proven, it is an insight about the sort of world we inhabit that is contained in every human language; the goal of Aristotelian and Platonic science is not to oppose or undermine but to define and elaborate that insight.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Finding the Mean by Stephen G. Salkever. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction 3

1 Aristotle's Teleology and the Tradition of Evaluative Explanation 13

2 Theorizing the Human Good 57

3 How Theory Informs Practice: Virtues and Rules in Aristotelian Practical Philosophy 105

4 Gendered Virtue: Plato and Aristotle on the Politics of Virility 165

5 Reconceiving Liberal Democracy, Part I: Democracy as a Range of Possibilities 205

6 Reconceiving Liberal Democracy, Part II: Liberal Virtues and the Public Life 237

References 265

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1991

"Stephen Salkever's [book] does more than explain Aristotle's understanding of the relation between theory and practice. It advocates a new style of theorizing—as old as Aristotle, but new to liberal democracy's defenders and critics. Salkever not only sheds light on Aristotle's political theory, but also presents a reconception of liberal democracy that reveals its merits, and allows us to evaluate policies and institutions in light of its best potentialities.... His work deserves to receive the attention bestowed on Rawls and Arendt or MacIntyre."—-Mary P. Nichols, The Review of Politics

"Insightful and carefully argued.... Regarding modern politics, Salkever makes a compelling case for moral education, mutual understanding, and the avoidance of doctrinal extremes."—-Fred D. Miller, Jr., The Times Literary Supplement

"Absolutely essential for any serious student of Aristotle's moral and political philosophy."—-Anthony J. Celano, Canadian Philosophical Reviews

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